When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, a man embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.

Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.

While she and her family are interned at Topaz Relocation Center during World War II, Mari gradually adjusts as she enrolls in an art class, makes a friend, plants sunflowers and waits for them to grow.

"More than 110,000 ethnic Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes at the start of World War II and transported to desolate detention centers after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in early 1942. Paul Kitagaki's parents and grandparents were part of that group, but they never talked about their experience. To better understand, Kitagaki tracked down the subjects of more than sixty photographs taken by Dorothea...

Near the start of World War II, young Manami, her parents, and Grandfather are evacuated from their home and sent to Manzanar, an ugly, dreary internment camp in the desert for Japanese-American citizens.

A young girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania eschews her Japanese heritage until she learns the details of the time her grandmother spent in an internment camp along with 112,000 other Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.